This experience taught me something crucially important: that New Guinea standards for greatness and for excellence are as far as I could determine the same as those of knowledgeable European curators, connoisseurs, and collectors… the people who really know the good work in museums, who are very deeply familiar [...]]]> I’m confused. Denis Dutton in Edge Magazine:

This experience taught me something crucially important: that New Guinea standards for greatness and for excellence are as far as I could determine the same as those of knowledgeable European curators, connoisseurs, and collectors… the people who really know the good work in museums, who are very deeply familiar with New Guinea art but who have never set foot in New Guinea, oddly have the same taste patterns as New Guinea carvers themselves. And this shows that with the art form, knowledge and familiarity with the whole field determines a convergence of taste. And that, again, has to be explained.

Dutton sees evolution’s hand at work in the development of human artistic capability. Well, maybe; but that seems to be overlooking a far simpler explanation.

Let’s assume the following factors are in play:

1. Historically Guinean art would have been expropriated without sale on the basis of what appeared to be most valuable rather than most beautiful;
2. Currently Guinean carvers sell their work, normally getting the highest prices from foreign collectors, and normally reserving their best work for those collectors.

These two assumptions appear relatively non-controversial. The first factor means that expert outsiders who have never been to Guinea will tend to have seen the “best” (most valuable) works, and so their taste will have been shaped by it. The second factor means that carvers now have a strong incentive to match their work to the tastes of expert outsiders who in large part determine the market for their carvings. If the two groups are in an economic relationship that has caused the tastes of both sides to converge around a certain set of aesthetics, it would explain why their tastes are so similar – while the tastes of the average joe are not:

I’m not saying that the New Guineans would make judgments that would coincide with every naive tourist — newcomers to the art — who gets off the boat. Tourists in my experience make very bad choices in buying New Guinea arts.

This example doesn’t present much, if any, evidence for a theory of evolved aesthetics, but it does serve as an excellent example of how our culture is shaped silently by our economic relationships. I’d be more interested to see a thesis that examines the influence that art might have played in economic terms rather than evolutionary terms, but I should also declare a vested interest, in that I’d rather make some money from my own writing…

I tend to think that the Singularity is merely the ne plus ultra of technotopianism, a trend which must be combated wherever it is found, but I avoid talking about it for fear of drawing down [...]]]> While reading this post, you should be listening to Let the Good Times Roll by Layo and Bushwacka!

I tend to think that the Singularity is merely the ne plus ultra of technotopianism, a trend which must be combated wherever it is found, but I avoid talking about it for fear of drawing down the wrath of Eliezer deliberately. However singularity thinking does force us to ask difficult questions about almost every aspect of human endeavour, and I like that. Probably a bit too much.

One such aspect is the question of what it really means to be human, intelligent and conscious, with the prospect of various combinations of biology, chemistry and engineering about to radically alter the way the human does business. You need to read a bit of background before the following will make any sense, and understand that one of the key tenets of singularity thinking is that – at some point in the near future, as computer processing power increases – it will be possible to upload a human mind to a computer.

This raises all sorts of questions, but in the course of arguing for the singularity on 3quarksdaily, Jesse M makes the following point:

Of course a simulated brain would require inputs like those from a real body or it would probably go crazy or become comatose, like a person locked in a sensory deprivation tank forever.

As I burnt my tongue on the pizza I’d just made, this set me thinking. What does it mean to be crazy or comatose? In essence it means that you involuntarily apply an abnormal filtering process on the inputs your brain receives. So being without inputs wouldn’t just be a cause of being crazy or comatose – it would be the result of being crazy or comatose as well. The causative chain doesn’t just go in one direction here, which makes it hard to disentangle which came first without being able to go inside and have a look – and that’s the one thing that currently we can’t do.¹

This made me think some more – what would it mean to have a brain without inputs? This is where you have to separate out mind from brain (sorry dualists): let’s say that you have a brain in a tank – how could you tell if there was anything going on inside that brain? From outside, how would you know a mind existed, if it wasn’t open to inputs against which you could test its responses as per the Turing test? From inside, how would you know you were a mind if you weren’t open to inputs against which you could define yourself (bearing in mind that even the Cogito requires external experiences, even if only to doubt them)?

And then I had the flash of insight which made me forget about my burnt tongue². A brain might exist in a purely physical sense, but without inputs it makes no sense to make the assertion that a mind exists. If there are no inputs, for all practical (and possibly for all philosophical) purposes there is no mind. It’s therefore entirely reasonable to assert that the mind exists only insofar as it interacts with an external world.

If this is the case, is it sensible to draw a hard line between our minds and that external world? (No.) Does the external world need us as much as we need it? (Possibly.) Does my tongue still hurt? (Yes, but I’ll be alright.) In the context of the ongoing singularity conversation, if you upload your mind to a machine, and then close that machine off to all inputs, what are the implications for the continued existence of that mind? Perhaps the Singularity doesn’t provide all the answers to the question of mortality after all.

The good news is that this does help to confirm my own prejudices that (a) The internet already constitutes a machine intelligence – just as these machines are becoming an extension (extrusion?) of our intelligence, we’re an extension of their intelligence – and (b) God is an emergent property of a universe with intelligence in it, in a similar way as consciousness is an emergent property of a body with a mind in it.³

1. Of course with a simulated brain it may well be possible to go inside and have a look (although I tend to doubt it, for reasons which are irrelevant to this discussion but have to do with levels of complexity). Interesting ethical question – should it be considered torture to deliberately inflict this type of condition on a conscious entity, even if it’s artificial? I strongly suspect that this may form part of the case that Eliezer makes in his AI-Box Experiment.
2. I’m sure there’s some lesson in there as well, incidentally
3. Note to self: this also creates problems for God, but he’ll have to take care of that on his own. Literally.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the [...]]]> In a Guardian interview, James Lovelock explains why he thinks that there’s no point in most of the environmental activities that we currently pursue. Or indeed, no point to most of the activities that we pursue.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

… What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Lovelock may or may not be correct that the apocalypse is knocking on our door, but is he correct that these sorts of activities – carbon offsetting, recycling, energy conservation and so forth – won’t make any difference?

No, he’s not, for at least four reasons.

1. At the very least, Lovelock himself has already identified one way in which they make a difference – they make us feel better. If the apocalypse is inevitable, then the only thing that is likely to make a difference is having a positive attitude – and so making people feel better is an essential activity.

2. Some of these activities may in fact generate the very skills that we may need to survive the apocalypse. For example, getting people more involved in their own food production – the classic “Good Life” scenario – would be inherently valuable. Imagine if nobody knew how to use a spade after the apocalypse – I’d be extremely hungry.

3. Lovelock fails to take into account differences at a level below the global – for example, energy conservation is inherently valuable because it saves money, which will mean more capital will be available for vital apocalypse mitigation initiatives. Although frankly you can shove your carbon offsetting.

4. Elsewhere in the interview, he states his belief that these global disasters “keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly.” Humans don’t just magically understand things; they learn through action, trial and error. If we don’t try out the “current canon of eco ideas” now – while we have the resources to do it – it’s likely that we will just make the same mistakes after the apocalypse as we did before.

Of course, there’s a critical point, which I’ve deliberately overlooked. If it’s true that these sorts of activities will make no difference AND they take resources away from more critical activities that will make a difference, then we should obviously pursue the latter. However since Lovelock doesn’t believe that we have sufficient time to advance in key areas such as nuclear power and food synthesis, it seems that he doesn’t believe that there are any critical activities that will make a difference; and thus we are free to pursue whatever makes us happy, including pointless environmental activities.

However what makes me sceptical about Lovelock, in the end, is not his science but his sense of perspective:

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose – that’s what people want.”

Once the second world war was underway “everyone… loved the things they could do”? The most charitable way to describe that view would be madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of last year’s Mr Mad competition most peculiar and frankly ahistorical – not to mention more than a little insulting to the veterans and victims of the war. 9 million dead in the Holocaust, 26 million dead in the Soviet Union, the citizens of Nanking and Dresden, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of veterans – yes, for them it was “one long holiday”.

If James Lovelock’s predictions of the future are as reliable as his interpretations of the past, then I wouldn’t start stocking up on Quorn and guns just yet.